Skillab OS

What does it mean to open source an education project?

In order to open up our courses to be used, reused and redesigned, we have decided to place the course materials on GitHub. This takes a traditionally technical open sourcing tool and repurposes it for our needs.

Every Skillab course consists of a minimum of three sets of materials:

Mentor notes – for volunteer programmers to use to help with the session

Notes for the students - which provide instructions on how to do the problems

Homework notes which include extension exercises

Our core programme also provides notes for a facilitator, and a JavaScript library that contains the code needed for the class problems.

An innovation in teaching

The role of a Skillab facilitator is not to be the ‘sage on a stage’, they do not need to be experts in programming. The expectation is for them to be able to provide encouragement to both students and mentors – to facilitate the exchange of knowledge. This is what sets Skillab apart from most other coding courses as we don’t require the expert to lead the class, allowing for a differentiation between these skills.